


A Friend of Mine

by alexcat



Category: Brokeback Mountain - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 07:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13631436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/pseuds/alexcat
Summary: Ennis goes back to Brokeback.





	A Friend of Mine

**Author's Note:**

> This one just had to be done. The title is from the theme song: He was a Friend of Mine.

Jack had been gone nearly twenty years. 

It didn’t feel like it to Ennis. It felt like forever and only yesterday too. 

He was still long and lean like he’d been as a young man. His hair was a little thinner and a little grayer. He had a few more wrinkles from spending so much time outside over the years. But he was the same. 

He’d never been back to Brokeback. He drove over there once in awhile, meaning to go up there, to revisit the scene of his one happiness. 

But he didn’t. 

He didn’t have to. Jack came to him when he closed his eyes, young and skinny with those sorta bucked teeth he had that summer. They laughed and loved in his dreams the way they had that summer. 

*

Junior had married and stayed married. Her oldest was nearly nineteen now and so much like he had been at that age that he nearly wept to look at the boy. She had one more, just nine and that one looked like her daddy. 

He saw them when he could. Working on ranches when he could get work took up most of his time. 

Jennifer had gone to work for her mama and Monroe in the catering business and had married a boy from back east who happened through town one summer day. She didn’t have no kids, but she and her man had taken over when Monroe died and her mama had lost the heart for the business. 

*

He was startled when someone drove up. Nobody ever come to see him much. 

It was Junior. She got out and opened the trunk, getting out a mess of bags and stuff from Wal-mart. 

“Hey, Daddy.” She brushed past him with her bags when he held the door open. She put them on the table. She began to put things in the refrigerator and the cabinets. “Thought I’d get you some groceries cause I know you forget to go into town most of the time. You can pay me back when you get paid.” 

She had done this before. It was her way of helping him. Truth was, he sometimes didn’t have much to buy food with. But he always did pay her back. 

She got a bottle of Jim Beam out of a paper bag from the liquor store and hunted two clean glasses to pour them both a drink. 

“Daddy, I been thinkin’ and I wanted to ask you something. You ‘member that summer when you and Mama got divorced and Jenny and I were staying with you? That man come to visit… Jack Twist?” 

He didn’t say a word, just nodded. 

“Well, I remember him from when we’s real little. Was he the one who you went fishing with?” 

Ennis nodded again. 

Junior took a sip of her drink and looked out the dirty trailer window. 

“Daddy, was he why you and Mama split up?” 

“What you mean?” He never was one for words; he just said what he had to. 

“Was he the one from Brokeback Mountain?”

He took a long drink, draining his glass and pouring another one. 

“When Monroe died, I was helping Mama clean out some stuff and I found a stack of postcards. From Jack. A lot of them had pictures of Brokeback Mountain on them. I asked Mama about him and she said that Nasty Jack was the cause of you leaving us.”

“Well, Junior, I never left you ‘n Jennifer. I left yer Mama. She just… I… Jack and me was friends.” 

“Daddy, tell me about him.”

“Not much to tell. We was kids when we tended sheep on ol’ Brokeback. He was a rodeo cowboy, pretty bad one too from what I hear tell. He went to Texas and married up with some equipment salesman’s girl and had him a boy.”

“Daddy, how did he die?” 

It was only then that Ennis realized his daughter knew about Jack Twist, really knew. 

“His wife said he had an accident changing a tire but I… I don’t know.”

“Have you ever been back up there?”

“What for? It’s just a mountain.” 

“To say goodbye.” She reached in her purse and pulled out the cards and handed them to him. 

Ennis caught the sob before it escaped but he didn’t stop the tears that slid out the corners of his eyes. 

“Don’t know if I can. I… he was my friend. I still can’t reconcile myself to his bein’ gone. I still hope when I get the mail there’ll be a card from him.”

“I’ll go with you. Kurt and Tommy are goin’ campin’ this weekend and Allie is goin’ to a weekend sleepover at Dakota Cox’s house.” 

He simply nodded.

* 

She showed up Friday morning dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt and cowboy boots. She got a cooler, backpack and a beat up old fleece-lined suede coat out of her car. Ennis had loaded his two horses and threw his tack and rucksack in the bed of the truck. His tent was old but it was still good, only a few holes in it. He grabbed his rifle and got in. 

They didn’t say much on the drive. 

Brokeback Mountain hadn’t changed much. It still belonged to the Forest Service and there were still designated camping areas. They packed as much of the food as they could into fat saddlebags and took off on the horses. 

He thought his chest would explode when they came into the clearing where he and Jack had their main camp, where they had stayed when he was supposed to be up with sheep, where they’d found love on a drunken summer night. 

“He wanted his ashes spread here on this mountain but his daddy reckoned that was just more of Jack’s foolishness.” 

Junior wisely said nothing. 

They set up camp and built a fire to ward off the mountain’s chill. He took a battered skillet out of his pack and the postcards out of his back pocket. He held them to the fire and when they were burning brightly, he placed them in the skillet and let them burn. In those minutes, all the cards that Junior had given him and all the ones he had kept after the divorce burned to ashes. There was barely enough to hold in his hand. He held the pan up and let the wind blow them away. The tiny black specks swirled in the air and were gone. 

Ennis never was one for words and there were no words to describe his feelings. He closed his eyes and when Junior slipped an arm around his waist, he could almost feel Jack there, telling him everything would be all right. 

~end~


End file.
